guarding holy mountains from malice, 2019: a reading in seven lenses
Acrylic on canvas, 65 × 90 cm (25 ⅝ × 35 ⅜ in). Painting by Yiğit Özen.
At a Glance
On the right three blue figures are ranged side by side, the same height, the same stance, arms interlocked; all three have a cross in their eye. Sightless guards have formed a chain. This linked-arm arrangement resembles less a guard than a barrier that stops whoever approaches; like the line seen before a mine site, at the gate of a building site. The hill behind them is made not of rock but of hundreds of small patches heaped one on another; a pink, swollen, touchable mass, cut off flat at the base like a pedestal. At its top is a single green tuft, the only living sign in the scene. From the holy mountain a handful of plants remains, and before that handful a cordon of three is drawn. What they guard against is unclear, there is no third party in the room; perhaps the threat is the figure on the left, perhaps only someone about to lose their balance.
On the left a red body is perched upside down on the tip of a thin pole, its legs flung to the ceiling, a yellow crest where its hair should be, a lit cigarette between its fingers. Close to the description of the stylites who stood for years upon a column, but in place of prayer there is a balancing act; the saint's place has been left to an acrobat. The base of the pole opens into five thin legs like a spider, and this thinness does not agree at all with the weight of the body; the balance is asserted in paint, not proven. The room is built like a box, the side walls narrowing toward the front, no door or window, plainly we are inside. At upper centre an overturned chair hangs in the air, its four legs pointing up, no shadow beneath it; the series' recurring furniture, unsat-upon, unused. The seat of judgement is empty, but the field has already been shared out.
The yellow base is cut against the purple along one line, without transition; the whole room is divided by colour like a stage set, and no edge is drawn with tape but by hand, tremblingly. The pink hill is the longest-worked place of the painting: each touch a press-and-lift movement, the brush entering flat and scraping upward, the lower end of the patches broad and the upper tapered, all in the same direction and none covering another. The three infants in front are laid on with thinned blue, the pink beneath read through them; the crosses in the eyes are thick and matt, pressed one by one. The repetition of the same form three times, as if from the same mould, is rare in this series; the sameness does not strengthen the figures, it fades all three at once.
Form and Composition
A box-shaped interior volume is set up, and the diagonals going from the four corners to the centre meet at the corners of the leftward-shifted back plane. While the thin, long pole in the left half sets up the painting's longest single force, the overturned seating unit suspended in the air in the upper central region touches nowhere and leaves no shadow beneath it.
A box-shaped interior volume is set up, the side surfaces narrowing inward. There are diagonal lines going from the four corners to the centre, and all of them meet at the corners of the back plane. The back plane does not sit at the centre of the crop but stands shifted to the left; the side surface on the right is narrower than the one on the left. The line where the ceiling meets the back plane is a sixth of the way down from the top, and the line where it meets the floor is a quarter of the way up from the bottom. These two horizontals divide the painting into three bands, and the middle band is the widest.
In the left half a thin vertical pole rises up from the floor. The base of the pole splits and turns into five thin feet, the feet spreading onto the floor and descending to the bottom edge. Above the pole there is a small circle, near the top edge. This vertical is the painting's thinnest and longest single force; its thickness is a finger, its length almost the whole height. A figure is wrapped around it, standing upside down. The figure's body curls to the right of the pole, its legs forking above and opening to the left, its arms reaching forward below. The angle the legs open is the widest angle in the painting and covers the upper left quarter.
In the right half stands a dome-shaped mass. Its base begins at the right edge and comes towards the centre, its peak at the half height of the back plane. Its surface is filled with short, slanted, repeating strokes; the strokes are oriented upward, and the painting's densest rhythm area is there. At its peak there is a small cluster of plants, spilling over the dome and entering the back plane. Beneath the dome a rectangular pedestal, and on the pedestal three small figures lined up side by side. Their height is a quarter of the dome and half that of the main figure. Their intervals are equal, their arms touch one another, and the outer arms of the two end figures curl upward, each making an arc.
In the upper central region an overturned seating unit stands in the air. Its legs look up, it touches nowhere, and there is no shadow beneath it. Its scale is close to that of the small figures. Its position is just below the top edge, about three fifths of the way in from the left. The contour is dark and closed everywhere; the distinction between figure and ground weakens only at the left edge of the dome, where the texture approaches the back plane.
The void gathers in the middle of the back plane. Because the two masses are pulled to the right and left, the exact centre stays empty, and there is a wide dark area there; its width is that of a dome. This void is the only place where the composition breathes. On the floor, meanwhile, there are a few horizontal marks drawn with thin light lines, stretching to the right from the feet of the pole and marking the direction of the plane. The eye's route descends from the peak of the pole, turns at the figure's body, slides right with the marks on the floor, stops at the row of small figures, and, following the back of the dome, rises up and arrives at the unit in the air.
Colour and Light
The yellow floor is cut off on a single line beneath the purple with no intermediate transition, and all the surfaces of the room are separated by pure colour like a theatre set. Because the red figure stands in the same half as the purple at a close value it does not leap out of the ground but leans against it, and the two white scrubs in the centre shine within themselves without showing a source.
The yellow floor is cut off all at once beneath the purple. There is no transition between them, the two colours meet on a straight line and both are left as a single layer. The same hardness is present on all the surfaces of the room: orange red at the sides, sky blue above, violet purple behind. The paint is thin in each, the brush marks are made out, and at the edges the other colour beneath seeps through here and there. Like the painting of a theatre set, the masses are separated by colour. The purple is the darkest region of the whole surface. A tone between aubergine and navy, broad and dead flat; its upper right part has stayed a little lighter, and there it is clear that the brush went dry. This darkness works like a backdrop to carry the figures. Along its left edge and its lower edge there is a thin mustard-coloured strip, standing like an old layer coming out from beneath the purple.
The hanging red figure sits on top of this purple. Its colour is a terracotta escaping to orange, its contours and inner lines a darker maroon. The distance between the red and the purple is not great, both are in the same half; and so the figure does not leap out of the ground, it leans against it. The orange of the walls at the sides, on the other hand, is much brighter than the figure; three colours from the same family stand at three separate saturations. The small blue strip over the arm and the yellow crown in the hair are the only foreign voices within that red mass. The green shrub at the upper right is the only green on the surface. A dark grass colour, laid in coil after coil and at almost the same value as the purple behind it; and so from a distance it stays like a patch. The hill on the right is a light salmon pink, with short terracotta-coloured lines scattered over it. The widest light area on the surface is there. Because it is at the same warmth as the orange wall behind it the boundary between the two is weak; as the hill approaches its edge it sticks to the wall. The pedestal beneath it turns to lilac and builds a bridge between the pink and the purple.
Three small figures are painted in cobalt blue and left transparent. The pink beneath them passes through them, and so their blues are not flat but mottled. Nowhere else on the surface is the paint this thin. The crosses in their eyes are black, and because there is no other black around them those small marks stay alone in respect of darkness. The only thing that can be counted as light is the two short white scrubs that pass through the middle of the purple. They show no source, and they give no direction; within the dark it is only they that shine. They are set thick, and they have covered the purple beneath them entirely. On the ground the light yellowish lines drawn over the yellow stand like an imitation of shadow, but they are not dark, on the contrary they are lighter. In the lower left corner there is a small dark-coloured signature over the orange.
Iconography, Myth and Title
The figure atop the pole calls up the ascetic who lived on a column, but the cigarette held in place of prayer reduces the saint to a balancing act. The holy mountain in the title is made of piled-up patches and gives no promise of solid ground; the ring formed by the blind guards whose eyes are cancelled with crosses resembles a habit more than protection.
A red body is perched atop a thin pole. Its legs flung upward, its arms opened back, its head looking down, and in its hand a lit cigarette. In place of its hair there is a yellow, upright crest. The legs of the pole spread across the ground like a spider. On the right a pink, speckled hill rises; on its top a green shrub has grown. In front of the hill three blue figures stand holding hands, and all three have cross-marks on their eyes. The yellow of the ground is separated from the colour of the walls by a sharp line.
The figure atop the pole is very close to the description of the ascetics who lived on columns. In those tales the person rises from the ground, cuts off contact with the world and stays there for years in prayer. In the state here, however, there is no prayer, there is a cigarette; it stands as though someone doing a balancing act has taken the place of the saint. Yet the basic sign is preserved: the man standing above the world, on a single foot. The higher the ascetic's column, the more his prestige would rise; here the height has turned into a display of balance. The person who climbs the pole is not expected to come down, but to die there. The legs of the pole, opened out like a flower, say how unsteady this office is.
The hill on the right must be the counterpart of the holy mountain mentioned in the title. The mountain's being held sacred is a widespread motif; the place where the god descends, where the law is given, where sky and earth meet. But this hill is made not of rock but of little patches heaped on top of each other; it stands like a piled-up mass. The single shrub on its top may answer the motif of the sacred tree planted at the mountain's summit. A mountain made of a piled-up mass gives no promise of solid ground. Beneath it there are three guards.
The guards are the strangest side of the scene. All three of the same height, the same posture, the same blue colour. Their eyes cancelled with crosses, that is, they cannot see. They are holding hands, that is, they form a chain. This is one of the oldest forms of protection against evil: to make a ring, not to let go of one another's hand. But the ring formed by the blind guards stands more like a ceremony than protection. A guard who does not see turns guarding into a habit. Although the three are holding hands, the circle does not close. Behind them two blue arcs rise; they can be read as horns or as two embracing arms.
In the middle there is an object hanging from the ceiling. A basket, a cage, or an overturned chair; its bars come down and its inside appears empty. The lamps hung above holy places hang down like this too. The lamp's being empty suggests that the light has already been taken. The room itself is closed and divided by coloured planes; the side walls narrow toward the front, that is, it is clear we are inside. Nowhere in the room is a door or window visible. The red point at the tip of the cigarette stands like the only burning thing in the scene and is held in a direction facing the hill.
Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
The three blue guards in front of the pink swollen mass stand hand in hand, but their eyes are cancelled with crosses; they can see neither what they protect nor the threat. The undifferentiated bodies, copies of one another, rather than forming a single force are all effaced at once, while the red figure balanced on a thin pole on the left is about to topple.
On the right a pink heap has swelled, its top covered in short little marks, with a green tuft of plant standing at its summit. It is supposed to be a hill, but it resembles more a swollen part of a body. A soft, full, touchable mass. In front of it three small blue figures are lined up, their arms interlocked, as if standing hand in hand. What they stand guard over is this swollen mass behind them. The base on which the mass sits is cut like a flat pedestal. Rather than a natural hill, it resembles an object brought to the scene and set down.
The eyes of all three are cancelled with two crosses. Guards who cannot see. They cannot see the thing they are charged with protecting, and indeed they cannot know against whom they are protecting it. Even so they have not left their posts, lined up at the same height, in the same stance, in the same row. Three small bodies that are copies of one another. Siblings are drawn like this sometimes, without separate faces, as if multiplied from a single one. There is no difference among them, and this sameness does not make them a force in their own right, on the contrary it makes them all faint at once. The ends of their arms are round, with no fingers. Hands made not for holding on but only for standing side by side.
On the left there is a completely different scene. A red figure with long limbs is balanced upon a thin pole, its body twisted, its arms flung upward. Its face is small, its hair upright like a yellow comb. It holds a small object in its hand, it may be taking it to its mouth. The bottom of the pole divides into thin legs, almost a stand. This figure does not stand on the ground, it has been set upon an object and tries to keep its balance there. The trio on the right, meanwhile, presses firmly on the ground. The two halves of the room show two different states of the body. The red figure's body is also divided by rings; a large spiral turns in the belly region.
Above, a piece of furniture hangs in the air, its legs facing up. No one is surprised by this. In dreams objects behave like this; gravity works in one place and does not work two steps away. The walls of the room do not join up neatly either, the ceiling is tilted forward, the floor opens out as a yellow flat. The space is held together but not quite closed. At the upper edge of the wall a thin strip has been left open, and from there another area enters.
If there is something being protected against evil, where that evil will come from is uncertain. There is no third party in the room. Perhaps the threat is the red figure on the left, perhaps only someone about to lose their balance. The green tuft at the very top of the swollen mass stands like the only living sign in the whole scene. Apart from it, nowhere is there anything that grows.
Society, Power and Technology
The three guards with linked arms are not stopping the bare hill behind them but the one who wants to approach it; once a single green tuft is all that is left of what was protected, the drawing of a boundary is used freely. The worker standing at the gate and the one across from him most often come from the same village, while the one who gives the order sits two hundred kilometres away.
On the right three figures are lined up side by side, their arms linked, behind them a high hill. All three the same height, the same shape, crosses in the place of their eyes. A row turned into a chain. This lineup is the same everywhere; in front of the mine site, at the construction-site gate, at the head of the road where the trees are to be felled. The men with linked arms are not protecting the thing behind them, they are stopping those who want to approach the thing behind them. The two are different jobs.
Only at the very top of the hill has a green tuft remained. The rest is bare. From the sacred mountain a handful of plants is left, and in front of that handful a barrier of three men has been set up. Protective measures always come late; when nothing is left to protect, the word protection begins to be used freely. Signboards are planted, the area is declared, a boundary is drawn. No one writes down how much what remains inside the boundary has shrunk. There are reports too, thick and illustrated. The activity's effect on the environment has been measured, measures will be taken, the trees will be moved elsewhere. But the institution that keeps track of how many of the moved trees took root has never been founded.
The figures in the row have their eyes closed. A guard who does not see cannot be held responsible for what he saw. The one who gives the order is not there in any case; the one who gives the order never stands behind the cordon, he sits at a desk two hundred kilometres away and, on the evening news, complains of the unruliness of the events. The man standing at the gate, meanwhile, is a worker who has come to his morning shift, most often from the same region, sometimes from the same village. Both sides standing opposite one another come from the same class and push each other. This is the bitterest place in the matter. There is always a camera watching who pushes whom, but there is no camera watching whom that pushing profits. The linked arms of the three figures also look not like a solidarity but like a compulsion; if one in the row broke away, the chances of the rest staying on their feet would fall.
On the left something entirely different is happening. A red man, turned upside down, stands at the top of a thin pole rising from the ground, his legs flung to the ceiling, something burning between his fingers. He is putting on a show. Within the same room there is a show on one side and a barrier on the other, and the two do not look at each other. This division is very familiar to me; the public's attention is always on the act on the stage, and what is happening over there at the cordon is learned only when something breaks. If the man at the top of the pole falls it is talked about, if the hilltop is shaved it is not talked about.
In the upper part of the room a chair stands upside down, tied to no string; its sitting face downward, its four legs turned to the ceiling. No one sits on it. The seat of decision is empty, but the ground has already been parcelled out. On the yellow ground below, the feet of the pole are splayed like a spider and its shadow stretches out thinly; it does not reach at all to the side where the hill is.
Art History and Comparison
In Calder's circus figures the balance really works, the object physically holds; the balance here is claimed with paint but not proven, and the acrobat's weight does not accord with the thinness of the pole. Three blue guardians, multiplied from the same mould like ushabti, wait before the hill, but their eyes have been cancelled with a cross; the scene of protection has been built with watchmen who cannot see.
At the tip of a thin pole stands a red acrobat turned upside down; its legs in the air, a yellow crest on its top, a small object in its hand. The bottom of the pole is fixed to a three-legged stand, its lines thin as wire. This wire-and-balance work brings Calder's circus figures to mind; there too a body is built with a few twists and the whole point is that it stays upright. In Calder the balance really works, the object physically holds. The balance here is claimed with paint, not proven; the acrobat's weight in no way accords with the thinness of the pole.
On the right there is a pink hill, a green shrub on top of it. In front of the hill three blue figures are lined up side by side, their eyes closed with a cross-mark, their arms raised and touching one another. The repetition of the same form three times is a rare thing in this series. A hand that works without a sketch, deciding as it goes, is generally expected to bring out each figure separately; here, however, there is a conscious multiplication. Guardian figures arranged in a row, of the same size, in the same stance, are a classical device of funerary art. In Egypt ushabti figurines were cast hundreds of times from the same mould so that they might work in the dead person's place. The three here too look as though they are waiting for something, but their arms form not a defence but a strange kind of greeting.
The space is set up as a box; side walls, ceiling, floor, and a flat panel at the back. In metaphysical painting, especially in Chirico's piazzas, such scene-boxes were used to shrink the figure, to isolate it within the architecture. Here the box does not shrink the figures; the acrobat reaches up to the ceiling, the hill fills the right wall. The stage is too narrow for its players. The surface of the hill on the right is also worth describing. It is not painted flat, but combed from top to bottom with short, slanting strokes; each stroke stands separate, like a fur or a field. To weave a landscape with such uniform small touches is a habit stretching from the hill depictions in medieval manuscripts to the rocky arrangements of miniature painting; there nature is turned into texture, made not by observation but by template. The hill here too does not come from observation, it is a mass filled in with the hand's own rhythm. The green shrub on top of it, meanwhile, has been added with a separate move, coil upon coil.
The pale chair hanging in the air adds a third layer. It is not tied to a rope, nor does it rest anywhere; it waits in the air, turned upside down. In other works of the series too the chair is a recurring object; as a piece of furniture that is not sat on, not used, merely standing inside the painting.
The title speaks of the protection of sacred mountains, and the painting meets this claim in a plain way: a hill, guards in front of it. But the guards' eyes are closed, cancelled with a cross. The scene of protection has been built with guardians who cannot see. In the lower left corner the signature stands tiny, almost buried in the yellow of the ground.
Material, Gesture and the Viewer's Experience
The pink hill is filled with more than two hundred separate press-and-lift touches, and because the brush entered at a slant and skimmed off, the patches stayed broad at the bottom and pointed at the tip. The colour borders tremble without any masking tape; the yellow here and there enters a centimetre into the purple and draws back, keeping the surface handmade.
Through the three blue babies in front the pink hill behind reads. The blue there is watered down, not covering, laid like a layer over the dry pink and it has not swallowed what is beneath. In the middle of their bodies the blue is darker, thinning at the edges; the brush passed once and on the second pass the places that thickened came out. The large blue arcs enclosing their arms are of the same thinness; at the point where they pass over one another the colour darkens twofold and the place of crossing gives itself away. The crosses on the eyes, on the other hand, are thick and matt, pressed one by one.
The pink hill is filled with hundreds of separate touches. Each touch is a press and lift movement; the brush entered the surface at a slant and skimmed upward, so the lower end of the patches is broad and the upper end pointed. All from bottom to top, in the same direction. Their number exceeds two hundred, I think, and none covers another; between them the pink ground stays continually open. This region is the longest-taking place in the picture. The purple wall beside it, on the other hand, is finished in two or three brush-widths, laid on vertically, and in places the brownish coat beneath seeps through.
Looking closely at the borders of the colour areas, you see that none of them was made by masking with tape. The line where the yellow ground meets the purple trembles, in some places the yellow enters a centimetre into the purple, in some places it draws back. The edge of the red on the left wall is the same, the brush stopped there in haste. At the corner where the blue ceiling above and the red wall cross, the two paints have ridden over each other and a dark seam is left between. These tremblings keep the picture handmade; had there been a machine-like edge, the whole surface would have flattened like a print.
The red acrobat is made by being filled in with a flat red and then having dark red contours passed over it. The contours are fluid, in a single pull, and flung after the ground beneath had dried; nowhere have they lifted and blurred the red under them. The ring-shaped curves over the legs are flung fast, turning and turning. The feet of the pole, on the other hand, are drawn with the finest tool; the black lines are almost transparent over the yellow, and the yellow beneath shows through them. The two white strips striking the wall are laid at the same speed too, in a single breath; they have stayed raised over the purple and, because they did not lift what is beneath, they are perfectly clean.
A ninety by sixty-five area, laid on its side. Hung at a metre sixty, the yellow ground stays at the level of my hip. Looked at from two metres you enter the room, the walls and the ground separate out. As you come within a metre the walls cease to be walls and turn into flat colour areas, because none of them has a second coat to give depth. The signature in the lower left corner stands over the yellow, and around it there is a few centimetres of strip the yellow never reached, where the canvas cloth stays bare.
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